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Upgrading a blockchain without forking must be like herding cats. It's not even really a technical problem at all; it's all about convincing users to run your n

• gjsman-1000 5y ago
  This is why Ethereum put a clever "difficulty bomb" in the code back in 2016. Basically, what the difficulty bomb does is it forces the network to hard fork every year or so to postpone the bomb, otherwise the math will cause the network to start getting exponentially harder very quickly until the point that the network can't move, the so-called "Ethereum Ice Age." It doesn't lock up the network immediately, but is a few month process, just in case a fork is late for some reason. If miners wanted to buck Ethereum 2, they have the difficulty bomb ready to go off, and need to have 51%+ of them agree on a new leader, and fast, and then deploy this new leader's code on their machines with the difficulty bomb postponement and rule change. That's what the Ethereum devs are betting they will fail at. Of course, the miners who are in the know are quite aware of the bomb and don't like the fact that if they refuse the death of mining Ethereum, the thing will self-destruct or that the devs would "hold them hostage" this way. For the dev's perspective though, I get it. How else would you get miners to accept Proof of Stake? There's no way they'd approve if they could help it.